


Show Your Hand

by makesometime



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Card Games, F/M, Mass Effect Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:17:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makesometime/pseuds/makesometime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Fill for a prompt at the Mass Effect Kink Meme:</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Seriously, Zaeed is one sexy piece of oldman badass. I want him and Shepard to spend an evening together - drinking hard liquour, playing cards, swearing, sharing old mission/war/assassination stories and when they're suffiently drunk they go at it, roughly, both being very aggressive, each wanting to be on top. Bonus points for Shepard riding Zaeed like there's no tomorrow.</p>
</blockquote>
    </blockquote>





	Show Your Hand

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for a prompt at the Mass Effect Kink Meme:
>
>> Seriously, Zaeed is one sexy piece of oldman badass. I want him and Shepard to spend an evening together - drinking hard liquour, playing cards, swearing, sharing old mission/war/assassination stories and when they're suffiently drunk they go at it, roughly, both being very aggressive, each wanting to be on top. Bonus points for Shepard riding Zaeed like there's no tomorrow.

He didn't know who she thought she was sometimes. Coming down to bother him on a daily basis, half-listening to his war stories, rummaging through his shit. He'd stopped paying attention to her when she wasn't discussing missions or standing right in front of his damn face, but her noise of interest from halfway across the room stole his attention by virtue of its rarity.

"What are these?"

He toyed with calling her on going through his things again, but thought better of it when he saw her genuine interest in what she held in her hands. "Wouldn't expect a young thing like you to know." He scoffed

"Playing cards, right?" She smiled, and damn if it didn't light up the room or something equally goddamn sappy. "God, I haven't seen these since Mindoir."

Interesting. "You played?" He asked. "Proper card games, not that Skyllian Five crap they got going on in Engineering."

Shepard nodded, still not looking away from the pieces of laminated card she was turning over and over in her hands. "With my father. Was pretty good."

Zaeed snorted. "Prove it."

Never one to back down from a challenge, Commander Fucking Shepard. He knew it, and yet issued one anyway. Foolish, or the best choice of his post-Vido life? Only time would tell.

He remained where he was, leaning against the wall and watching as she took a look around his hidey-hole. She smiled to herself, pulling the chair from the corner of the room and setting it in the middle of the floor. Then she dragged one of the unoccupied crates over to place carefully in front.

"I'll be right back." She said distractedly and left the room, leaving him utterly confused and pretending not to be at all interested in what the good commander had up her sleeve.

Five minutes later she returned, dragging another chair behind her. She cocked an eyebrow when she saw he hadn't moved, smirked at his suspiciousness. She wheeled the new chair over to face the old, on the opposite side of the crate. Fetching the pack of cards, she sat down and started to shuffle.

"Where'd you get that?" He asked, reluctantly walking over to join her without her having to ask him (he had meant to hold out, goddammit).

"Sickbay." She said, as if it should be the most obvious thing in the world.

"You wheeled that all the way down here?" He chuckled. "Must have got some funny looks."

She shrugged. "I'm used to funny looks, Massani. Don't give a damn what people think of me after all of this."

She started dealing, setting the cards out in a pattern he was familiar with – one that he would have bet good money on her never having come across in her life. She caught his eye and he guessed from the manner of her resulting smile (small, barely an upwards tug of her lips – a smile of genuine pleasure, no matter how muted) that she'd chosen such a variation on purpose

"So, what are we playing for? Credits?" She paused, playing the idea over in her head. "No, we both have plenty of those. Bragging rights?"

"Clothes?" He suggested, just for a kick, just to see her anger. 

Which didn't come – in its place something coy, almost. Teasing. Certainly not a denial. She stood and crossed to the – what he had thought was secret but apparently was _not_ \- hiding place for his bottle of old Earth whisky. She brought it back over and slammed it down on the crate. "Lose a hand, take a shot."

"Sounds good to me." He agreed. "Now shut that pretty little trap of yours and deal me in."

#

Shepard swallowed a mouthful of the liquor as she watched Zaeed deal another hand; curling her fingers around the neck of the bottle she rested her chin on the top as she observed.

"Take a fucking picture, it'll last longer." He said without even looking up.

She scoffed, putting the bottle down. Sitting back in her chair, she chanced the question that had been plaguing her for weeks. "Why did you join us? I know the fuckton of credits helped, but you could still told us to carry on our merry way in favour of not facing down a suicide mission."

"I'm a sucker for a pretty face." He drawled. Sensing she was actually looking for a serious answer this time, he grunted his displeasure, leaning back and propping one leg up on his knee. "Twenty years I waited for revenge. For that son of a bitch to regret everything he did to me so I could I end him. No point to my continued existence beyond that – so, far as I saw it, a suicide mission was bloody fitting."

Shepard nodded. "Fair enough."

"That's it? Fair enough?" When she just shrugged he gave a grudging laugh of respect. "Okay. Tell me this. Why the hell didn't you take this ship and all its crew and become a goddamn space pirate?"

"It's tempting." She smiled, all teeth and dangerous intentions. "But – and don't take this as bleeding heart nonsense – I _need_ to do this. Because no one else will."

Zaeed nodded, once, before chuckling. "Damn, Shepard. This is getting a bit too serious for my liking."

Shepard smirked. "I forgot – you're all about the _danger_." She purred, picking up the cards and readying another hand.

"Right. And you're not."

The smirk grew. "I've come to find drinking gets old when you've got the constitution of a Krogan." She said with an exaggerated sigh. "What do you say we make things... interesting?"

Zaeed's eyes sparkled with good humour. "You better be suggesting what I think you're suggesting."

Shepard looked him over; dressed in a tank and black fatigues, he was in the same position as her. All that mattered now was if she was willing to take the next step.

"Winner chooses what gets removed." She offered, not pausing in her dealing, even when the hungry look he shot her sent a bolt of heat straight through her body.

Zaeed picked up the bottle and took a swig to toast her decision. "The day I turn down an offer like that is the day I put a bullet in my brain. Again."

#

The game proceeded quickly (Shepard was unsurprised). It was a pretty even thing, in the end, the only real moment of excitement coming when Zaeed told her to take of her top and she got to watch him try and focus as she sat nude from the waist up, completely unconcerned.

"What's your best kill?" Zaeed asked as he stripped himself of his fatigues.

Shepard bit down a sigh of disappointment when her assumption that he would go commando turned out to be unfounded. "I was twenty-one, on leave after a particularly shitty mission. Holed up in a bar somewhere to drink away my worries when this Batarian walks in. And they all look the fucking same to me, but I knew, just _knew_ that this was the bastard that had killed my family while I watched, hidden and scared shitless."

"Made him pay?" Zaeed smirked.

A wicked grin crossed her face and she hummed, dealing the next hand. "And then some. Learnt a lot about Batarian biology that day."

Zaeed laughed, toasting her with the bottle. "Good girl."

"Yours must be Vido, right?" She postured, and he nodded. "Tell me another one, then."

He thought for a moment and Shepard enjoyed the slow smile that spread over his features. "Told you it took six men to hold me down – offing them was pretty special. Four of 'em took nothing, bullets to the back of the head when they weren't even paying attention. But the other two... I knew the bastards pretty well. A bullet was too good for those two."

Shepard grinned. "Go on."

"I set it up well and it took a while, a real long con. Spent a shitload of credits on getting them where I wanted them, false communications and intel planted in their paths and they didn't even know it. Made it so that one of them got there first, I had a bit of time with him, time to soften him up." He smiled, taking a swig of liquor. "The look on the other bugger's face when he turned up and recognised the mess of a man I'd left... Worth all of the effort."

The heat that had pooled in Shepard's stomach when she made Zaeed strip his shirt off earlier started to pulse happily as he weaved his story. Without really thinking about it, she stood, rounding the crate and ending up beside him. He looked up at her curiously and she decided to just throw caution to the wind, straddling his lap in a fluid move that belied the amount of alcohol she'd consumed.

"So this other guy knew what was coming to him?"

"Smart woman." Zaeed murmured, hands curving over her hips as he looked down at her breasts, licked his lips. "I worked them over for _days_. Gave 'em hope sometimes too, just to break them that little bit more. When I finally ended it... swear I've never been so goddamn relaxed in my life. Best therapy there is."

Shepard groaned, gaze fixed on his mouth moving to form the words that were making her increasingly hot. "Anyone ever told you you talk too much?" She muttered, before leaning in to capture his lips.

His lips turned up into a self-satisfied smirk as she rocked against him, arms firm around him while his hands worked at her belt before settling on her ass. His tongue parted her lips with little resistance as he stood, keeping them firmly together while moving across to his cot. She was heavier now, she knew, with all the tech inside her but he lifted her like it was nothing and it was _almost_ like the old days again – except in the old days this would have happened in a darkened room with a faceless man or woman to whom she had no emotional attachment whatsoever.

When he started to lower her to the support of the cot she pulled away and fixed him with a thoroughly unimpressed expression, suggesting all sorts of retribution if he thought he was getting the upper hand. Any protestations caught on her tongue when he shoved one rough hand into the newly-opened material of her fly, pushing harshly past the resistance of her standard-issue underwear and finding her hot, slick and ready. 

His shit-eating grin as he discovered her reaction to him riled her enough for her to loop her legs around his hips and flip them, so that he landed hard on his back on the cot with her straddling his thighs. His hand, until now annoyingly still against her core, started to move; fingertips brushing her clit in time with their laboured breathing. Shepard started to lower his underwear, working around the muscular forearm between them until she couldn't push the material any further. Sensing a way to gain the upper hand, even as her back arched when he landed a particularly well-placed swipe to her bundle of nerves, Shepard let her fingers curl around his length and _squeezed_ until he fell back against the cot with a groan.

His hand slipped out of her pants and she stood to shuck them, all prepared to get down to it and fuck him sideways when he reached for her again, pulling her on top of him and rolling so that he was nestled between her legs. In one quick move he hooked his forearms under her thighs and lifted, spreading her wide and open to his hungry gaze. 

He smirked at her slick folds and then up at her face. "Forgive the lack of foreplay, love. Doesn't look like you need it."

Shepard groaned as he tested her flexibility, leaning over her completely. "Smug son of a bitch." She said, green eyes blazing. "I don't get on my back for just anyone - make it worth my while."

Without further hesitation Zaeed thrust forward, the thickness of his erection filling her to almost the point of pain. She didn't have time to focus on that when he picked up the pace to an almost bruising level near-on immediately, the cot squeaking beneath them as she struggled to find something to hang on to.

She had been entirely too long without this kind of contact, hell, especially without the odd emotional connection she and the merc had discovered over the course of the evening. One of her hands held on to his bicep, covering his tattoo, as the other fisted in his short hair, holding his mouth to where it was now tracing over her skin. 

He angled his hips so that with each thrust he caught her clit, and she felt her release approaching with an almost unbelievable speed – if the promise of its impact hadn't been so constantly hinted to in the knowing way he looked at her, she'd have been embarrassed. Instead she just met his every move, clenching her inner walls around him on each retraction, digging her heels into his ass to urge him on.

Zaeed lifted his head to watch her face as he felt her start to pulse around him, smirking when she threw her head back and shouted into the empty room, shuddering against his larger form. Then he did the unexpected, flipping them over so that she was sat over him, without him slipping from her body, not allowing her time to enjoy the release he'd given.

"Over to you Shepard."

There was a challenge in his tone that she would never back down from so she braced her hands on his chest and started to move. She rolled her hips against him slowly, working out the best angle to make him sweat, smiling when she heard his groan. She angled herself so that he rubbed over her front wall every time she rocked against him and once satisfied she let go completely, riding him with the force she'd always wanted to, the force she knew he, if no one else, could take.

Zaeed looped his arms around hers, his palms flat against her sides so that his thumbs could brush over her nipples with each thrust. She sighed hintingly and he rolled his eyes, covering her breasts completely with his warm hands, squeezing each peak with increasing force. 

Behind her she could sense him lifting his feet to brace against the cot and then he was thrusting up into her in response to her own frenzied motions, letting her know he was close by the way he stopped trying to contain his grunts, his growls, the sounds of his own release. She let her nails bite into his chest as she searched for a second orgasm and the extra edge of pain made him break, spilling into her with a low roar. She followed shortly after, clamping down on him and drawing out his orgasm until they were both spent.

Shepard collapsed down into the hard plains of his chest, both of them panting and struggling for composure for quite some time.

"Got any more stories?" Shepard asked eventually, propping her chin up on his sternum.

Zaeed smirked. "Hundreds."

Shepard hummed. "That's what I like to hear."


End file.
